


Coming Home

by Silverheart



Series: Bats and Birds [15]
Category: Batman: Arkham (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Family, Gen, Post-Game(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2018-04-16 19:56:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4638240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silverheart/pseuds/Silverheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Barbara meets up with Jason for a heart-to-heart, now that the dust has settled.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coming Home

_So I'm coming home_

_Lost on a road I don't belong_

_I rest my soul; I'm so alone_

_-_ Coming Home, Alter Bridge

* * *

 

She wouldn’t have picked a coffee shop as Jason’s choice of rendezvous, not ever. Back before, he would have opted for a rooftop or somewhere suitably heroic yet shadowy. Now…some dead end alley, all graffiti and dumpsters and practical caution.

Not a perfectly normal, cheerful coffeehouse near Gotham U. She sighed and rotated the lid on her cup again.

“You came.” She looked up to see Jason standing over her. He was wearing a simple gray sweatshirt, the hood pulled up so no one could see his face unless they were looking right at it. The brand was particularly terrible surrounded by all this ordinariness.

“Of course I did.”

He grinned, a genuine silly toothy expression, and pulled up a chair. “Right. Yeah.” He had a coffee cup identical to hers in hand. His clothes were new but didn’t fit all that well. They looked like cheap jogging wear. Charity donations, she guessed. “How have things been going?”

“Good. Finishing my masters.”

“Really?” He looked surprised. Jason still thought of her as a thirteen-year-old, didn’t he? “It’s been...it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, it has.”

He looked away and took a sip of his coffee. “I’m sorry about everything, Barbara.” The shakiness was there again, the frail thing you didn’t expect when you looked at him. “I am so sorry.”

“It’s alright, Jason,” she told him, quiet and gentle, “It’s okay.”

“It’s not.” She could hear the Knight’s tears in his voice, from that awful night. “It’s really, really not.”

She took his free hand in both of hers. “That’s alright, too. Thank you for coming home. We missed you.”

He nodded slowly. “I shot five men last night.”

It took all she had to not react to that.

“They were going to break into a woman’s apartment, rape her, and rob her. Nothing more dramatic than that.” He turned back to her. “So I shot them. Dead.”

“Jason.”

“Was it wrong? They would have done those awful things, and if I had just caught them, when they got out—because they would, you know they would, they always do—they’d try it again. And people would get hurt.”

She remembered, a long time ago, when she’d met Jason while she was being held hostage at her school. She’d begged for the life of a teacher who was working for the Riddler because his family was being held. She’d won the argument. Jason hadn’t thrown the man out the fourth story window.

Jason had been trying to do the right thing. That’s all Jason had ever been trying to do. He’d just been so utterly broken.

She spared a moment’s unrelenting hate for the Joker. “It’s…complicated.”

“They would have torn her to pieces, Barbara. Just for their _fun_ ,” he spat out. He bowed his head. “I’m not going to justify myself to you. You know my reasons because you’ve thought them. But I need you to know that these people deserve it. I don’t do it lightly.” He didn’t say he didn’t enjoy it, but she didn’t think his reasons for that were so different from hers, or Dick’s, or Tim’s.

“I believe you.”

“Thank you for taking me back.”

“I told you we would.” He shook his head, smiling wryly. “You could never have been that broken, Jason. Never.”

He shrugged and took another drink. “So you’re dating my replacement, now?”

Barb blushed in spite of herself. It was like when Dick used to tease her about Tim, years ago. “Tim’s a good guy,” she said, “Even when things were at their worst, he never abandoned me.”

“Credit where credit’s due, I guess.” His eyes drifted to her wheelchair. “Thank God we’ve seen the last of that bastard. If he was still—“

There was a hard shadow in his face, but the foundations of it shook like old scaffolding. “He’s not.”

“Thank God.”

They stay and drank their coffee for a minute. “Where are you staying these days?” Barb asked.

“Here and there.”

Well, he looked clean, so he must be showering somewhere. He’d clearly gotten money for coffee somewhere, but she knew very well that the dead had wallets, too, so she didn’t ask. “If you want somewhere more permanent, we can get you one.”

He laughed. “Do you know that I’m dead, Barbara? On paper, I mean. It looks suspicious when dead men start paying rent on a downtown condo.”

“Give me some credit. I can cover your tracks.”

He relaxed, slowly, as if it were a foreign thing. She could see his eyes darting around the room, assessing. Dick, Tim, and Bruce had always done the same thing, but it was never as twitchy as this. “You always were good with computers, and brave as hell on top of that. I wasn’t surprised you joined in officially.”

She had so many questions, but they all led back to an abandoned wing of Arkham and that laughing demon. “It was the right thing to do.”

He nodded. “I have a question.”

“Go ahead.”

“I know he doesn’t approve of the killing. No one knows that better than me. But do you think, maybe, he’d be proud of me fighting the good fight again? At least a little?”

Barb thought about it, knowing what the trite answer would have been—and knowing Bruce was more empathetic than anyone gave him credit for. It was why he didn’t kill, she thought. He saw the humanity in even the most savage of men.

And Jason, unlike so many of those, was just trying to do the right thing, for the sake of the innocent and broken. “I think so, Jason, I really do.”

**Author's Note:**

> Jason gives me so many feels.


End file.
